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All those Internet Governance pundits who track ICANN the way paparazzi track Paris Hilton are barking up the wrong tree. They've mistaken the Department of Street Signs for the whole of the state. The real action involves words like rbldnsd, content filtering, and webs of trust.

Welcome to the Internet! What's on the menu today? Spam, with some phish on the side! We've got email spam, Usenet spam, IRC spam, IM spam, Jabber spam, Web spam, blogs spam, and spam splogs. And next week we'll have some brand new VoIP spam for you.

Now that we're a few years into the Cambrian explosion of messaging protocols, I'd like to present a few observations around a theme and offer some suggestions.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, the foremost concern in my mind is this: The final solution to the phishing problem requires that people use a whitelist-only, default-deny paradigm for email. Many people already subscribe to default-deny for IM and VoIP, but there is a cultural resistance to whitelist-only email — email is perceived as the medium of least reserve. I believe that we must move to a default-deny model for email to solve phishing; at the same time we must preserve the openness that made email the killer app in the first place. The tension between these poles creates a tremendous opportunity for innovation and social good if we get things right, and for shattering failure if we get things wrong. Can you imagine a Balkanization of messaging, where if you want to talk to someone you have to first join their BBS? I'm an idealist: I care deeply about the future of free communications. I don't want to screw this one up.

The following points help me develop my argument.

1. Every open medium can be abused.
2. Emigrating from a hostile environment and jailing violators are two sides of the same coin.
3. Extradition only works when governments agree.
4. National borders don't work online; we need new kinds of boundaries.
5. DNSBLs are the prisons of Internet email.
6. Let's create a world where the consensus reality is as inclusive as possible.

One: Every open medium can be abused.

The abuse comes in a hundred different forms, but deep down they're all, somewhat tediously, the same: bad guys telling lies for profit. (Do you remember the one exception, the kook looking for a time machine?)

Why do closed media suffer less abuse? Because closed media have centralized architectures, built-in authentication, real-world identities, prerequisites for access, well-defined usage guidelines, and short paper trails. Of course they're better at kicking offenders off the network. They have staff paid to do just that!

Open systems, by design, are more of a free-for-all.

So why don't we just build one big closed system? Many youngsters have given up on email, and prefer to communicate over Myspace and AIM. If you want to talk to them, you have to sign up with Myspace and AIM. If you cause trouble, Myspace and AOL reserve the right to kick you off the system. The economic costs of signing up — the time it takes to sign up, pass CAPTCHA, and learn how to use the system — are analogous to other economic costs that have been proposed, such as "penny per email". And enforcement can be much more effective.

Just as the free market has voluntarily chosen a monopoly regime for desktop operating systems, maybe the free market will eventually choose a monopoly regime for messaging systems. We may simply find that it's cheaper to pay one vendor to manage spam for everyone.

But I doubt it; just as the Microsoft mainstream fuels the Linux and OS X countercultures, any messaging mainstream will fuel alternative modes of communication. Why?

Because I might not want to live in your country. If World of Warcraft — a very complex messaging system — declares itself a gay-free zone, where will gay gamers (gaymers?) go? They'll go elsewhere. Time and again we have seen governments declare a uniform standard for behaviour: time and again we have seen people get up and walk away.

Now we're getting into politics and governance. You might want to go make a cup of tea: this argument is about to detour down the scenic route.

Two: Emigrating from a hostile environment and jailing violators are two sides of the same coin.

Much of mankind's political history can be traced to the idea of voting with your feet. If you don't like the way things are done in one place, you go someplace else.

When the Mennonites left Europe for America in the 18th Century, they were simply implementing "no thanks, I'm leaving".

Emigrating away from a hostile domain is a bottom-up approach. Symmetrically, this pattern has a top-down version. Mennonites enforce community standards by shunning. In every society, people who don't play by the rules get sent to prison or exiled. And that's society implementing "no thanks, you're leaving."

(Populating Australia with criminals implements both approaches at once.)

At the G2G level, when countries get mad at one another, the first thing they do is break off diplomatic relations and pretend the other country doesn't exist.

But that only works to a limited degree. One man's free speech is another man's blasphemy. And, as certain Danish cartoonists and European newspapers have recently discovered, globalization makes it real hard to ignore the sins of your neighbours. Some societies are not content to apply their values locally — "we don't keep dogs as pets, but we don't mind if you do" — but wish to apply them globally — "we don't draw certain kinds of pictures, and nobody else may either."

But online, the feet are virtual, and every place is, in some sense, everyplace else. This means that, online, we need to come up with new ways for people of one mind to "migrate" away from people of another.

Three: Extradition only works when governments agree.

Most developed countries in the West generally want to help catch one another's criminals. But, as we noted above, community standards differ. Governments get particularly touchy in matters of jurisdiction and sovereignty. So Roman Polanski lives in France, unmolested by the United States.

If you sue spammers in Tampa, they pop up again in Taiwan. Extraditing skript kiddies just doesn't scale. National borders don't work online.

That's what makes it so hard to police the Internet. The very idea of policing goes hand in hand with the idea of jurisdiction. And jurisdiction ultimately goes back to the idea of a state.

Nation-states have been around in their modern, governmental form, for a couple hundred years now. The modern Internet has been around for maybe twenty. If nation-states are a horse and buggy, the Internet is a hybrid automobile.

Asking a nation-state to manage Internet crime is like asking a Mountie to pull over a Prius.

Four: Our global village has no borders.

Ten years ago, back when we all thought global villages and information superhighways were just the bee's knees, hordes of breathless futurists proclaimed the Internet has no borders! Borderless was good, hot, fun!

Now we're discovering that organized crime loves the Internet precisely because it has no borders, no jurisdiction, no police.

Well, almost no police. Ten years after we built the information superhighway, you can't spend ten minutes on 101 without seeing a Cisco billboard announcing "trojan horse corralled" or "denial of service denied". (The whole ad campaign feels bafflingly insider, sort of like a postmodern Burma Shave, but authored by mildly autistic types who simply don't care whether anybody else understands what they're saying.) But what does it mean? It means Cisco is beginning to provide infrastructure on the Internet the way Halliburton provides infrastructure in Iraq: they build the roads and they man the checkpoints.

Do we really want a centralized authority integrated into the infrastructure, or do we want the ability to choose which communities we want to live in? We can take power back into our hands and draw our own borders…

Five: DNSBLs are the prisons of the Internet.

Spamfighters like to think of DNS blacklists as a cutting-edge tool for the 21st century, but I would wager that if you went down to Lancaster, PA, flagged down an Amish farmer driving his 18th century horse and buggy, and showed him a DNSBL, he would recognize it instantly: "you're shunning those who can't hold their tongues!"

Just as shunning is a frightfully effective form of Amish social control, DNS blacklists are a frightfully effective form of Internet social control.

The interesting thing about blacklists is that you get to choose which ones you want. Today this just means that if you pick a DNSBL that's a little bit too activist, you get some false positives, some intentional collateral damage. But tomorrow, if we flip the switch from default-accept to default-deny, picking the wrong whitelists, or too few of them, could result in eclipsing whole swaths of the Net.

That would be bad. It would also be dangerously tempting. Most people don't know what they don't know. It's very easy to whitelist all the good people in your addressbook, but it's harder to whitelist all the good people not in your addressbook. If we want to keep email as open as it used to be, we have to be very inclusive. This is where reputation systems come in: just as credit bureaus tell financial institutions if someone is likely not to pay their bills, reputation systems tell mail receivers if someone is likely to be a spammer. Reputation systems are essential to solving the first- contact problem, but that is a topic for a different article.

Crudely but functionally, a consensus reality begins with a group of persons who recognize each other's existence. When we use DNSBLs, we refuse to communicate with the entities listed — we killfile them, but the killfiles are shared. I'm told that Spamhaus covers something like half a billion mailboxes: that's half a billion mailboxes who don't talk to anyone listed on the SBL.

In a default-deny world, we're less interested in the bad guys and more interested in the good guys. I could easily imagine a world where you whitelist everyone in your addressbook, everyone in your family, your company, your industry network, your church, your school, your neighbourhood ... and that might get you good enough coverage that you wouldn't notice the legitimate messages that are getting blocked.

Six: Let's create a world where the consensus reality is as inclusive as possible.

What have we learned?

We counter abuse in open media on the borderless Internet not by bringing antiquated legal instruments to bear, but by collectively agreeing on whom to shun and whom to put on the guest list.

Shunning is what you do when your default rule is "allow" — when you're liberal in what you receive, you expect others to be conservative in what they send. When they're not, you killfile them.

In open media, though, we're discovering that maybe the default rule should be "deny". In big cities, we've learned, tediously, that most strangers who approach us on the street are trying to tell us lies for profit. The Internet has become a big city. When others are liberal in what they send, maybe we should be conservative in what we receive. The opposite of a blacklist is a whitelist. The opposite of shunning is selective introductions — think Victorian social norms. Whole industries are springing up around these ideas: accreditation and reputation are hot topics in the antispam world today, but the ideas behind them are as old as human civilization. If there is nothing new under the sun, then let us learn from history and not repeat it!

We need mechanisms to agree on who's worth talking to and who's not. First-generation, proprietary, integrated approaches like Goodmail will pave the way for next-generation technologies based on open standards. And these technologies will lay the foundations for what I consider to be the meat of Internet governance: rules that determine precisely to what extent my Internet overlaps with your Internet, and whether I let you into my world at all. In short, whether the walled garden I build for myself opens on the walled garden you build for yourself.

After all, if there are no national boundaries on the Internet, then maybe, just maybe, every man is an island, entire of itself. Each of us builds bridges to our neighbours, and we roam on those bridges until we feel uncomfortably far from home.

As a matter of public policy, I want to set a goal: in a world of default deny, let's use all the tools at our disposal to make our walled gardens as big as they can be. Why? Because, as Donne said, "I am involved in mankind"; if you are not in my whitelist, I may not be in yours, and we are both the poorer for it.

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Share your comments

But meng, how or why do you posit that email is moving towards default deny?

Some dnsbls blocking everything they can see? Nobody with a lick of sense uses them on a truly production mail system.

Or is it cisco's cutesy ads that advertise their firewalls / DoS mitigation appliances etc?

Or, as has been attracting a lot of recent circleid attention, is it that Goodmail is being used to attempt to make senders of solicited transactional and marketing email share some of the costs of that email with the ISP?

That concept is kind of a laudable idea, by some lights - but i have yet to see how well it will scale .. at least goodmail is limiting its scope and aggregating payments, unlike most of the harebrained online stamp and epayment schemes I've seen…

One case study both AOL and goodmail may want to look at is a korean ISP called Daum, that implemented a system that was basically "buy stamps from us so we'll whitelist your bulk mail. We'll do this only to commercial senders, and we'll let our users vote on how solicited / unsolicited your email is when its stamped...". I have not seen or heard of it recently thouth at least with senders who concentrate on the korean market, it was a very significant thing, because Daum is to korea what AOL is to USA internet users .. the 800 lb gorilla

This presentation by Jaewoong Lee, CEO of Daum, describes their system. Some parallels can possibly be drawn to the goodmail approach. Yes I know there are quite a few differences, but this is the closest thing to a case study / prior history of this happening that I can think of.

Meng's article suggests a dichotomy: that the world will be "default accept" or "default deny", and the latter choice is the only one that will solve the problem of phishing. This is not a sound argument because the dichotomy is false. While "default accept" and "default deny" are indeed mutually exclusive, they can be applied to a much finer grain than the world as a whole. We can ask of individual email addresses whether the default rule is "accept" or "deny", and an individual can have addresses of both kinds, reserving the "default deny" address for important correspondence.

Furthermore, the emphasis on the default rule fosters a simplistic view of things by ignoring rules other than the default. A stack of rules could first start with a whitelist (offering preferential delivery to the main inbox), then go through a series of blacklists, and end in "default accept" (offering delivery to a secondary inbox). An email address governed by such a rule stack would technically be "default accept", but to think of it in those terms would be to miss all the important aspects.

Anyone who is looking for further reading material on this subject may find my CEAS 2004 paper, Beyond Identity [PDF], a worthwhile read.

Both whitelisting and blacklisting have the same flaw at the moment.
They both have a problem establishing the identity of the sender.
Whitelisting an e-mail address is all well and good, until a friend of yours has his machine taken over, has all the email addresses harvested from his address, and then used as a spam sending zombie.
If the SPAM were to come at you using e-mail addresses from people in your white list, then it would land straight in your inbox.
The reverse of blacklisting using e-mail addresses is already laughable due how easy it is to spoof e-mail addresses, even though that’s all what many webmail accounts and applications offer in the way of blocking.

Doing it on IP address faces similar problem, you can't really whitelist an IP address, as most people aren't on static ones. And blacklisting an IP address will cause legitimate mail to be blocked as the spammers may not be the only one that are sending from that IP address.
Those sending the spam have long ago learnt to keep mobile and so you are always one step behind.

The fundamental problem that has to be solved first is to replace SMTP with A-SMTP or similar, so that to send mail you first have to authenticate yourself on the mail server, and it then compares the e-mail address you are using against a list of valid e-mail addresses for that account.
It also allows you to set limits per account of how many e-mail you are allowed to send.
Secondly the ISP's have to block all those zombies on their networks by blocking or redirecting port 25.

At that point whitelisting/blacklisting mail servers will become feasible.

Meng, I think you hit the nail on the head here in your usual eloquent way.

Suresh, the reason we all must move toward default-deny is that the overhead and administrative costs involved in our current whack-a-mole environment are unsustainable. We need a system which empowers end users - to make each man an island.

This is bad news for the likes of us who make our livings whacking moles. But it will be good for most end-users when they get to choose their corespondents.

It is of course a depressing development, as we move away from the original open design of the email system. But it is better to move to a more closed system which is still basically fair and empowering to end users than to stick with the current one, with it's baroque balkanization.

The best way to stop phishing is for trustworthy entities to cryptographically sign their e-mails. Unfortunately, few entities do this except security-notification outfits like US-CERT.

If a user receives an e-mail purporting to be from, eBay, but it's not properly signed and eBay has told their mail recipients to look for a valid signature, then the recipient should not believe it's from eBay. Pretty simple. All current mail clients, including most Webmail clients, support S/MIME. So, why is e-mail signed so rarely?

Nobody is claiming it is easy, and yes, just replacing SMTP with a better standard won't be the final solution to getting rid of SPAM. In fact I believe that there will always be SPAM, and there is no final solution as long as there are people that want to send it.
However if no action is taken, eventually the level of SPAM will be so high that email will die in an avalanche of SPAM, and nobody will want to use it anymore as it will be harder to send legitimate mail due to the levels of filtering and blackhole listings while your inbox still gets flooded by unwanted emails.
What we can do is make it harder to send SPAM, and at least throttle it a bit.

The best way to stop phishing is for trustworthy entities to cryptographically sign their e-mails. Unfortunately, few entities do this except security-notification outfits like US-CERT.

Why not pass the cryptography to the SMTP layer? Signed emails in the lower level could easily be added by sharing the public keys on the DNS txt fields, thus providing a way to verify if the sender is allowed to send an email from a specific domain.

Following this idea, who controls the DNS controls who can send mail from the domain. Only using this approach one can deny-by-default all mail which claims to be coming from a domain but failed the signature test.

Can you imagine a Balkanization of messaging, where if
you want to talk to someone you have to first join their BBS?
I’m an idealist: I care deeply about the future of free
communications. I don’t want to screw this one up.

Too late Meng. We been doing this since the 80s. Logging into our system was NOT an option, never was, never will be. The relaxation of authentications and authorization methods in the name of a 'open internet' caused major security problems. We all knew it was all possible, but it was ignored and those who adhered to weak unsecured methods are now dealing with the consequences. It did cause major grief with the need to alter some secured designs to our online hosting (BBS) products, but we knew it was aberration and people will eventually come to their senses. This explains why we are have experienced a very high customer return rate - the promiscuity with an open internet was getting too dangerous. It also explains the reborn direction is to have "login only" or membership systems.

Nobody is claiming it is easy, and yes, just replacing SMTP with a better standard won’t be the final solution to getting rid of SPAM. ...
However if no action is taken, eventually the level of SPAM

We need to be careful to distinguish activity from progress. We also need to be careful to acknowledge the actions that are already underway. In particular, the efforts to create a trust-overlay to email, where Good Actors, are vetted and their mail is subject to preference handling.

When we know exactly what functional changes are needed for email, and when we have tried to add them to the SMTP infrastructure, and when the attempt has failed, then we will need to consider replacing SMTP.

Until that time, any call for replacing SMTP needs to generate three questions:

Short of keeping your computer off the net, ultimately, no technological fix can completely eradicate all phishing and spamming. There's always the chance that the bad guys will systematically attack systems across the internet, and defeat white-listing- indeed that has happened many times with various viruses. There's even a chance that your best buddy is a phisher without you knowing.

As I see it, the main problem is to contain/minimise the issue; so that the vast majority of the mail *sent* is not of this type-all mail on the internet goes through an ISP of some kind.

The bayesian mail filters seem to be handling the problem pretty well on the receive side of the equation- most of the bad emails get filtered out. That looks like it will continue to worsen the economics of both phishing and spamming to the point where the *flood* will subside to a trickle.

Still, right now, many ISPs are being irresponsible, and these ISPs need to be identified (using SPF) and made to apply bayesian filtering and other techniques to the send side- if the mail never enters the Internet, or made so it enters much more slowly, the load on servers will be slashed and the user experience will greatly improve worldwide.

That way we won't *have* to use white lists- white lists are expensive solutions involving every individual worldwide having to do work to update them. We need to apply more automated brute-force techniques to the problem.

a) There are lots of other solutions to phishing than default-deny, some of them quite promising. Indeed simply adding warnings to, rather than blocking, mail from unknowns, including rewriting the URLs for warnings, would do a lot about phishing.

b) Though it's hard to get people to change sides on this, in the anti-spam community, there are those who view the content of the messages as the issue and those who think bulk mail abuse is the issue. Long before we went to a world of default-deny, we would want to experiment with learning the difference between individually written and bulk mail, and applying any default-deny regimen to bulk mail.

Brad — email is a long long way from default deny. And content is - mostly - not an issue (except for truly illegal content that's internationally recognized as criminal .. child porn and warez for example)

Unsolicited Bulk [and/or Commercial] Email seems to be a fairly good working definition, for all the hairsplitting that goes into the "let's first define what spam means" question.

DKIM does seem to have some amount of potential here, and the spec is not as fragmented as SPF currently is. At least it does tend not to bite people with .forwards the way spf does. But I wouldnt claim it is a cureall either.

Bayes? Not very effective on a scale larger than your personal mailbox, at least when considered out of the realm of ivory tower research papers. And trivially easy to poison using random text "chomskybots" (the first bayes posioning random text that people saw in spam was a weirdly surreal jumbling of Noam Chomsky's writings .. which probably became more readable in the process)

You try more and more technical solutions in the vague hope they'll have any effect at all .. any lasting effect. Then let me know.

I've used a default deny email scheme, using the TMDA challenge response mechanism. It is an effective way to stop email spam, but almost whatever hurdle you place in peoples way will be too much for some legitimate correspondents.

In my case one of the things that stopped me using TMDA, was the failure of an intelligent, but busy (and let us not deny it, very attractive) lady to pass the challenge.

Also the concerns of my peers that such challenges, to forged addresses, might constitute spam. However this is an argument that is more about social agreement on what is acceptable, than technical issues, since well designed C/R systems mitigate the cost, by limiting the number and size of challenges. And the wide spread use of C/R would mean people would rarely see challenges to faked addresses (here there is sometimes a divide between mail admins who worry about load, and end users who care only about eyeball time; there are more end users than email admins).

As such if such a system gained social acceptance, it would be a workable way of reducing a lot of the unwanted email. But we can achieve as much, possibly more, with less intrusive systems.

However I hold that the primary source of the current email spam problem, is underlying security issues with widely used client software, and issues of monoculture and monopoly. Hence my article here about megaphones.

Phishing is a different question entirely. Whilst it might be possible to use anti-spam measures to restrict the effectiveness of bulk phishing runs, there will always be people trying to scam others, and such restrictions would only force them to be more selective in their targeting (stupid, rich people don't deserve to be scammed either).

As such the main reponse to phishing be legal, and not technical, although some simple technical measures may be worthwhile. The failure of governments to provide an effective response so far, has allowed the criminal element to flourish, but it is quite a small number of individuals, and easily solvable with political will. Governments have deployed transnational responses to other types of cross border crime, and I believe it is merely technical competence that holds many of the legal agencies back in this area.

I currently deploy greylisting, with blacklisting, and MIME type based rejection (for viruses), and trap about 99% of the unsolicited bulk email using these three techniques, with no end user interaction, and no false positives rotting is "suspect spam" folders, and very few reports of false positives or problems.

I strongly agree with the comments that content based filtering is of limited use in dealing with spam, and am utterly frustrated when I daily encounter false positives from various big email providers, who systems are both less effective, and more error prone.

The desire to change the world is very natural, but sometimes it is more effective to work out, and deploy effective local solutions. And share those with people who trust your judgement in these matters.

SPF stalled because it require global changes in how SMTP is deployed. The big providers generally advertising rules that said "our email servers, or maybe from anywhere else" which made it ineffective against backscatter, and it also failed to address the case where a similarly named domain is registered, and used with SPF, so limiting its effectiveness against forgery.

IP based blacklisting on the other hands stays fashionable, because despite its obvious limitations, it is simple and effective, and more importantly doesn't require a global change.

Isn't a final solution to phishing simply SPF? In particular, if spam filters blocked any mail where the sending domain has an SPF record and the sending relay isn't on it, then any domain that wanted to prevent phishing could do so, simply by creating a correct SPF record?

Note, this is not a general solution to spam. Just an observation that limited SPF is still a good protection against phishers.

Spam filters (spamassasin+crm114) block almost all the phish I am sent. Virtually all the phish that actually reaches my INBOX has a From address that is on my whitelist (e.g. service@paypal.com). If e.g. paypal had spf records and I filtered mail from relays that were not present in those spf records, then basically all the phish I get would disappear.

No this system is not perfect. In theory, some phish might be able to get through the spam filters as well, but phish mail actually has a lot of structure that makes them particularly easy for spam filters to catch. e.g. you probably get very little normal mail that asks you to validate your account etc.

I only thought about this today because I finally read this article. I have not yet personally configured by inbox accordingly. Is there any reason to believe this plan shouldn't work?

As for recognizing phishes as spam, spamassasin usually misses the phishes, but crm114 is very good at catching them. I assume that, in general, rule based filters will miss phishes, but bayesian-style pattern filters like crm114 are really good at catching them. Note I have not tried the spamassasin bayesian stuff so I can't give a review of how it does against phish, but again I would bet it does substantially better than the rule based stuff.

Note: I have things configured so that if both spamassasin and crm114 agree that a mail is spam, then it is definitely spam. If only one of them think it is spam, then it goes in a maybe folder. Only if neither think the message is spam does it reach my inbox. All mail that reaches my inbox is automatically whitelisted (unless otherwise designated).

I must not have been clear before. My point is that crm114 does a really good job at catching phishes in general. Mail with "plausible" but different from-addresses does not get through because those addresses are not on my whitelist.

The only phish that reaches my actual inbox has a whitelisted from addresses. With SPF, that problem goes away.

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